Riley Thorn and the Corpse in the Closet by Lucy Score
16
8:15 p.m., Saturday, August 15
Dinner was the usual Santiago shit-show of bickering, shouting so his father could hear them, and excellent food.
Nick would have enjoyed the familiarity of it, except for the fact that he couldn’t stop glaring at his brother-in-law, who couldn’t stop smiling at his girlfriend like he knew her and liked her.
Over pork tenderloin and soy-glazed carrots, Andy wrapped up another stupid reminiscence of his time with Riley at Shippensburg University.
“Hilarious that you had sex with my girlfriend,” Nick muttered under his breath, gripping his steak knife until his knuckles went white.
Riley elbowed him in the ribs. “Will you please relax?” she hissed.
“So, Riley, is it?” Marie cut in. “What is it you do for a living?”
His girlfriend removed her elbow from his torso. “I just started working for Nick a few months ago.”
“Sleeping with the employees? Really, Nicky?” Carmela sniped.
His sister was a miserable pain in the ass, which normally didn’t bother him. But tonight, everything bothered him.
“Speaking of sleeping together—” he began. This time Riley kicked him in the ankle. He grunted.
“I worked as a proofreader for a few years,” she continued. “Before that I used to work for Channel 50 in the newsroom.”
“That Griffin Gentry is a very handsome fellow,” Marie said to no one in particular.
“No, he’s not,” Nick said.
“He is,” his mom insisted. “He’s so tan and tall, and he has such a deep voice.”
Riley hid her laugh behind a cough.
“I assume, given how we met, you also do something for the Harrisburg police,” Marie said. “Were you undercover as a sweaty homeless person?”
“Mom,” Nick said, pointing his knife at her. “Be nice.”
“What?” His mother was all innocence. “I was merely making an educated guess.”
“I’m doing some freelance work for Detective Weber,” Riley answered, reaching for the wine.
“What could the police need with an unemployed proofreader?” Marie wondered.
“Help me,” Riley whispered to Nick over the rim of her wine glass.
“So, Es, make any teachers cry lately?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Only one this week,” Esmeralda said, picking up her glass of juice with both hands.
“Es skipped fifth and sixth grade,” Nick explained. “She’s a teacher’s worst nightmare.”
“In that she’s so much smarter than all of the other students and most of the teachers,” Carmela added, lest anyone confuse being smart with being a behavioral problem.
“So how did you two meet?” Andy asked as he shoveled a fork full of meat into his stupid face.
“Nick knocked on my door selling Nature Girl candy.”
Esmeralda gave him an owlish look.
He held up his hands. “Easy, slugger. I wasn’t really selling candy,” he promised his niece. “I was trying to track down Riley’s neighbor to serve him papers.”
“My son lies for a living,” Marie lamented. “Where did we go wrong?”
“By making him your favorite,” Carmela shot back.
Nick tossed a hunk of parsley at his sister.
“Don’t throw the garnish! You know how expensive parsley is these days?” Miguel shouted. His dad’s favorite hobby was complaining about how expensive things were compared to the 1960s. “In my day, grocery stores gave parsley away for free! Now I gotta shell out four bucks for a clump of organic. It’s a travesty!”
“You wish I was still a cop like Weber?” Nick asked his mother loud enough that his father heard him.
“A cop is respectable. What you do? Mr. Spy?” He wiggled his hand in the air. “Not so much.”
“Nick’s a private investigator. He’s very respectable,” Riley said, coming to his defense.
“Don’t bother, Thorn,” he said.
“Maybe to you,” Marie said pointedly. “But in this family, we strive to serve our communities.”
“Yeah. Mom here serves the community as an executive in a drug company that got sued for the opioid crisis,” Nick said.
She waved the insult away. “The good we’ve done far outweighs the bad,” she insisted.
“I run restaurants. I feed hungry people. You wanna tell me I’m not serving my community?” Miguel shouted, barreling his way into the conversation.
“Oh, please. You charge sixty dollars for a plate of oysters,” Carmela pointed out. “Don’t make it sound like you’re slinging soup to the homeless.”
“Your mother and I give back! We sponsored that 5k last year.”
“It was for diabetes, and you gave every runner a five percent off coupon for caramel flan,” Nick shot back. “They probably had to double their insulin doses.”
“Leave Dad alone,” his sister said, changing sides.
“Stop trying to be the favorite,” Nick told her.
“No one is the favorite. You’re both equally disappointing,” Marie decided.
“Me?” Carmela gasped. “What did I do?”
“You work in real estate development,” Miguel pointed out.
“Because you told me to get into real estate development like Mom’s parents,” Carmela said, exasperated.
“How is kicking farmers off their family farms and turning the land into parking lots and strip malls with vape shops giving back to the community and being respectable again?” Nick mused.
“Oh, kiss my ass, Nicky. At least my apartment and office didn’t burn to the ground because of my job.”
Riley looked dizzy by the swiftly changing alliances.
Nick patted her knee reassuringly and then opened another bottle of wine.
“Let’s change the subject, shall we?” Marie said, holding out her glass for a refill.
“So, Riley, what dirt do you have on ol’ Nicky here that forced him to move in?” Carmela asked.
“Carm, why don’t you eat something and stop being so hangry all the time?” Nick asked, topping off his sister’s glass.
“Moving in with a girl and bringing her to family dinner is a first. I assumed there was coercion. Or maybe she’s pregnant.”
Their mother gasped and made the sign of the cross.
“You haven’t set foot in a church in thirty years, Mom,” Nick pointed out. “No one’s pregnant, and I’m the one who did the coercing. I moved us in together and surprised her.”
“I’m just glad you’re not still involved with that woman who got you shot,” Marie said. “What was she? Some kind of hotline psychic or tarot card reader?” She shuddered dramatically. “Can you imagine?”
Riley’s fingers dug into his knee under the table. But he ignored the warning.
“I am still involved with her,” he announced. “And she didn’t get me shot.”
“Watch your mouth at the table, Nicholas!” his dad bellowed.
“He said ‘shot,’ not ‘shit,’ Pop-pop,” Esmeralda said, coming to her favorite uncle’s defense.
“Probably shouldn’t be announcing that in front of your girlfriend, dummy,” Carmela sneered.
“Riley is clairvoyant,” he said.
“Ah, hell,” Riley muttered under her breath.
“Thorn, you can’t honestly care what these lunatics think after this,” Nick told her.
She sighed. “My mom is the tarot reader, and my aunt is the hotline psychic. My grandmother is a famous medium, and I’m somewhere in the middle.”
“Sidekick? Who’s got a sidekick?” Miguel demanded.
“Not ‘sidekick.’ Psychic!” Carmela shouted.
“Who’s psychic?” his dad scoffed.
“No one is,” Marie chided. “But Nick’s friend Riley thinks she is.” She twirled a finger around her ear in the universal sign for cuckoo.
“She doesn’t think she is, Mom. She is.”
“Wait a minute.” Andy shoved his glasses up his nose. “This sounds vaguely familiar.”
“My family doesn’t watch the news,” Nick explained.
“Ever?” Riley asked.
“Just Griffin Gentry in the mornings. He and that Bella Goodshine are so cute together,” Marie crooned.
“A psychic,” Carmela said. “My friend Trina went to one in Virginia after her mother died. Do you know her?”
“Your friend’s mother or the psychic?” Riley asked.
“The psychic. She ripped off my friend to the tune of four hundred dollars and said her mother was finally at peace.”
“Trina is an asshole. Maybe her mother was finally at peace,” Nick said.
Carmela snorted. “That woman was hell on wheels her entire life. Death wasn’t going to change that.”
“Do you talk to dead people?” Esmeralda asked Riley.
She shrugged, then nodded. “Sometimes.”
“No, she doesn’t, sweetie,” Marie insisted. “She just says she does so she can take people’s money. No offense.”
“Offense taken big time,” Nick countered.
“It’s fine,” Riley insisted.
He shook his head. “Trust me. You don’t want to start things off as a doormat.”
“Good point.”
“When are you going to get yourself a real job, Nicky? Stop playing peeping tom—” Miguel shouted.
“Private eye!” Nick corrected him.
“Whatever,” Miguel said. “You come from a long line of hard-working Mexican people. Your great-grandmother came to this country with only fifty thousand dollars to her name. Where is your appreciation for your heritage?”
Riley blinked.
“Dad’s great-grandparents were loaded,” Nick explained. “He likes to pretend he’s a self-made man, but he started his first restaurant with his trust fund. The last time he went to Mexico, it was a five-star, all-inclusive resort in Cancun.”
“Mexican-Canadian people,” Marie reminded everyone sternly so as not to leave out her side of the family tree.
“Yay, Tim Hortons,” Carmela said with an eye-roll.
“Riley, are you going back for Alumni Weekend in the fall?” Andy asked. “We could go together.”
“Over my dead body,” Nick snapped.
“Did you know he was going to say that?” Esmeralda asked her.
“Is it over yet?” Riley rasped.
“Do you see now why I didn’t tell them about us?” Nick asked, holding up the bottle of wine.
She shook her head. “I’m the getaway driver. Speaking of which, when are we getting away?”
“The second you’re ready.”
“Let me finish this pork first. It’s amazing,” she decided.
He respected her priorities.
They cleaned their plates while his parents argued about whose heritage was more vibrant, and Carmela lambasted Andy for not cutting his meat correctly. Esmeralda opened her book and ignored everyone.
Riley leaned over. “I’m sorry about all this.”
“About what?”
She gestured around the table.
“This? This is normal,” Nick scoffed. “All of our family dinners end up like this. You should see us on Thanksgiving.”
“All your family dinners?”
“That’s why we only get together once a quarter. It gives us enough time to forget about why we were fighting.”
“Wow. Then I guess you were right,” she whispered.
He slid his hand under her hair and rubbed her neck. “Of course I was. About what?”
“Your family is weird.”
“Told you. I’ve been thinking a lot about this in the past hour. I think we should never let our families meet.”
She nodded, considering his wisdom. “I think that’s an excellent plan. You know where they’d never meet? Costa Rica if we moved there.”
“God, you’re beautiful,” he said. “Now finish your pork so we can go—”
“Don’t say it,” Riley said, pointing her fork at him.
He grinned.
“Nicky, when you give up on this sleazy investigator thing, you can come work for me,” Miguel decided. “I need an assistant manager at the new tapas place.”
“You scared the new one off already?” Carmela scoffed.
“It’s not my fault kids these days are pampered little wusses! Why are you yelling at me, boss? Stop throwing forks at me, boss,” he mimicked.
“Why don’t you at least consider going back to the police force? Look at the job security Kellen has with all the poor people in the city killing each other,” Marie pointed out. “And think of the nice girls you met when you were a cop.” She shot a pointed look at Riley.
“You ready yet?” Nick asked her.
“One second.” Riley set her wine glass down carefully. “Thank you for a delicious dinner, Santiagos. Miguel, Marie, your blatant disregard of your son’s accomplishments, happiness, and well-being is truly terrifying. We’ll be going now.”
His mother gasped. “Well, I never.”
“Bye, Riley! It was great to see you again. We’ll have to do a double date sometime soon,” Andy said enthusiastically.
“What did she say?” Miguel demanded.
“She insinuated that we don’t care about our son,” Marie bellowed.
“Oh, I don’t think she insinuated anything,” Nick said, slinging his arm around his girl’s shoulders. “Night, folks.”
“Night, Uncle Nicky,” Esmeralda said without looking up from her book.
Nick grinned the whole way to the front door.
